Warburg Institute and Institute for Advanced Study art historian; major exponent of
iconography to American scholars. Panofsky was the son of Arnold Panofsky
(d. 1914) and Caecilie Solling (Panofsky), wealthy Jews whose fortune came from
Silesian mining. He was raised in Berlin, receiving his Abitur in 1910
at the Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium. He spent the years 1910-1914 studying philosophy, philology and art
history in Jura, Berlin (where he heard lectures of the art historian Margarete Bieber, who
was filling in for Georg Loeschcke), and in Munich. While taking courses at Freiburg Universität, a slightly older student, Kurt Badt, took Panofsky to hear a lecture by the founder of the art history department, Wilhelm Vöge. Panofsky was at once enamored and wrote his dissertation under Vöge in 1914. His topic, Dürer's artistic theory (Dürers Kunsttheorie:
vornehmlich in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener) was
published the following year in Berlin asDie Theoretische Kunstlehre
Albrecht Dürers. Because of horse-riding accident, he was exempt from
military service during World War I. Instead, he attended the seminars of
the medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin. He married Dorothea
"Dora" Mosse (1885-1965),
also an art historian from a wealthy family, in 1916. In 1920 his habilitation was accepted in Hamburg on the topic of Michelangelo, the manuscript only rediscovered in 2012. His habilitation in hand, Panofsky was called
to chair the art history department of the newly established University of
Hamburg in 1920. His first graduate student was Edgar Wind.
The decade of the 1920s was one of brilliant writing. In Hamburg, Panofsky
formed part of a group of cultural intellectuals. He developed an intimate
intellectual circle with Fritz Saxl with whom he published a 1923 monograph on Dürer's Melencholia I,
Aby Warburg, and the philosopher and art theorist Ernst Cassier,
centered around Warburg's Institute (see Warburg entry).
Panofsky, a "young, witty, acerbic, conceited genius" according to one student,
William Hecksher, developed an immediate student following. Two early papers,
“Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” (1920) and “Über das Verhaltnis der
Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie,” (1925) demonstrate Panofsky's theoretical
heritage to Cassirer and Aloïs Riegl. In 1924, his book Idea was
published, a discussion of the ideas of the intellect vis-à-vis the imitations
of the world of perception. His overt intelligence won him the first full
professor of art history at Hamburg (ordentlicher
Professor) in 1926. In 1927 he published Perspektive als
symbolische Form, a dazzling blend of personal theoretics and wide-ranging
knowledge of Renaissance art and thought, built around Cassirer's neo-Kantian
theories of "symbolic forms." In the academic year 1931-1932, Panofsky
paid a visit to the United States representing Warburg's think tank, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg and teaching at New York University.
The Nazis' assumption of power in Germany forced Jews out of academic positions; Panofsky returned to Germany in the summer of 1933 to supervise oral
examinations and dissertations for his remaining students before permanently
emigrated to the United States in 1934. He published his most famous article, an
analysis of the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck, in the Burlington
Magazine the same year. After a year teacing at New York University, Panofsky became the first permanent
professor of the School of Historical Studies of the newly founded Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, a private research center near Princeton
University created so that Jewish scholars (primarily) could work near the University, but not as faculty. Panofsky's move from
Hamburg to the United States coincided with a methodological transformation. In
Panofsky's early career, he experimented with various approaches to his
subject. By the time he had settled in Princeton, he had arrived at the "conviction that the
methodological problems with which he had once grappled had been successfully
resolved." (Moxey, p. 93). In 1939 Panofsky published Studies in Iconology:
Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, book which, among other
essays, argued for the distinction between iconology and iconography.
His 1943 book on Albrecht Dürer, combined many of his
published ideas on the artist together with a sharp intuitive eye to Dürer’s
prints. Panofsky next issued a primary-source document and commentary on the
Abbot Suger and the founding of the Gothic style, Abbot Suger on the Abbey
Church of St.-Denis, in 1946. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism appeared in 1951, a
book about Parisian architectural relationships with the principles of a
scholastic summa. His 1947-1948 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard
appeared as the 2-volume monograph on northern Renaissance art, Early Netherlandish Painting,
in
1953. It was a detailed iconographical study demonstrating how works of visual
realism could incorporate elaborate Christian symbolism convincingly.
Among the book's many revelations was the discovery that the famous Arnolfini
double portrait by Jan van Eyck was a wedding document.
Rensselaer Lee, chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology at
Princeton University from 1956, convinced Panofsky to begin teaching regularly
at the University as well. Panofsky's work at the Institute for Advanced Study
attracted other art historians to study with him. These included Heckscher in 1936, Louis Grodecki in 1951, Jan van Gelder,
1953, and Léon "Bob" Delaissé in 1959. He presented
Gottesman lectures at Uppsala University which appeared in 1960 as the book Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. The lectures posed the (now)
generally accepted notion that smaller "renaissances" (re-births) of the
classical happened periodically in medieval art and literature before the major
one in Italy. He retired from the Institute emeritus in 1963 and
was succeeded by Millard Meiss. Panofsky was immediately appointed Samuel Morse Professor
of Fine Arts at New York University. His lectures there resulted in the
1964 book Tomb Sculpture. His wife, Dora, died in 1965 and the
73-year-old Panofsky married the 36-year-old art historian Gerda Soergel [Sörgel]
(b.1929) the following year. Two years later he
suffered a series of heart attacks and died. Panofsky's posthumous
literary output continued for twenty years. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel
continued to update his Abbot Suger book. The six Wrightsman lectures he
delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were issued as Problems in
Titian, Mostly Iconographic in 1969. His collected essays appeared in 1995. A son, Wolfgang Panofsky (1919-2007),
was a Manhattan-Project
physicist and Nobel-Prize winner. Panofsky’s many students, in addition to
Heckscher and Wind, included Hugo Buchthal, Edgar Breitenbach, Ingeborg Fraenckel Auerbach, H. W. Janson, Lotte Brand Philip Foerster, Ursula Hoff, Robert A. Koch, and Walter W. Horn.
His papers are housed at the Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. In 2012, his habilitation, thought to have been lost was discoverd at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in files of the founding director, Ludwig H. Heydenreich

Though Panofsky is considered the "ur-iconologist," his methodology
was diverse and is difficult to summarize. Primarily a scholar of medieval and northern Renaissance art, he is most frequently associated with the concept of
iconography, matching the subject-matter of works of art to a symbolic syntax of
meaning drawn from literature and other art works. His work broadened into a
theory of iconology; what Germain Bazin characterized as “the work of art as a ‘symptom’”
(Bazin 217). However, Panofsky was a broad thinker (in the tradition of Cassirer)
whose work evolved over a period of time. Another acknowledged debt was to Riegl, the Austrian
art historian who espoused the notion of Kunstwollen. Panofsky’s notion of perspective as a metaphor in Renaissance art occupied his thinking for an extended period (and
resulted in at least one full book). He contended that theories of
proportion were generally too elaborate to be applied uniformly to actual works
of art. Panofsky's iconology did not preclude a sensitivity for formal
considerations or style. The conceptual framework of any period, he wrote, is always subservient to the
underlying the style of the art. His use of iconology as the principle
tool of art analysis brought him critics. In 1946, van Gelder criticized Panofsky’s iconology as putting too much emphasis on the
symbolic content of the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work
as a unity of form and content. Otto Pächt, the Vienna art historian, pointed out in a celebrated book review
in 1956
using the case of the van Eyck Arnolfini and his Wife painting, that iconology would elucidate this important work very little.
Indeed, Panofsky's conclusions on this double portrait were essentially overturned in
1998 by Lorne Campbell. Panofsky himself had mixed feelings about the success of his method (Cassidy). A scholar who rejoiced in learning and his own mastery, he wrote at times to his medievalist colleagues in Latin (Hourihan). LS